Social Networking

I feel I'm getting behind in my blogging. Social networking is something I have had something to do with in the past, having two children living away from home. I don't actually have facebook or my space but I have their passwords so I can check what they are up to occassionally and look at their photos. If I were to join a network it would be either my space or face book for the simple reason that my kids are on these sites and most of my friends from school and uni have a page on these sites. At this stage I'm not interested in having a site as I find it hard enough to answer emails, faxes and phone calls. This would be just another thing to check each night when you get home and reply to. That sounds lazy does't it? My friends have issues with who to allow to be friends as well. Some only want adults as friends, some are happy with children and adults on their list. It is lucky that you can pick your friends I suppose. The other problem I find with this is the child peer group pressure issue. I have heard of children being persicuted by their friends in posts that everyone can read and you can't remove.
Anyway, moving on, I can see a few postitives in a work environment that may be advantageous. My library is a small library and there are four libraries in our shire. I think this networking between the libraries would be advantageous for sharing information, ideas and upcoming events etc. As a library I could see having a site would be a great advertising tool. Each week or month you could post the new magazines and books that come in and advertise when the new exchange has arrived. I could help school kids with homework and assignments with information available in the library. You could also have themes for younger kids each week and post books available and a play day or some such activity. We work in conjunction with the local playgroup at present.
Hopefully I can get the next two programs through before too long so I can feel I am catching up.

What's a Wiki

I don't know if I would be confident enough to actually change anything in a wiki at this stage but it is something that I may try to do in the future.

Since I'd never heard of a wiki before and didn't quite grasp its use, I had to do a bit more work on this topic than the others. I had a quick look at the comparisons between all the wiki sites and which were the best for each use. Obviously if I was setting up a wiki I would have to go to the wiki sites that are easy to set up and have heaps of user support. There was also talk of the simplist syntax, I have no idea what that means, but put simple in front of it and I'm happy. The wetpaint wiki seemed to one that I may have been able to handle as it seemed to be easy to follow. You could easily see who and when it was updated and a list of members. It had lots of tags that made it easy to follow. It didn't seem too hard to edit a page but I was too chicken to have a go.

The first site I looked at was the book lovers wiki. That seemed a bit out of date but ok I guess. The next was wookieepedia as I had no idea what that might be. I hate starwars so that was a bad choice. What on earth is a spoiler by the way. This site had over 66,000 articles though so there must be plenty of fans out there. The last wiki I went to was Winsconsin Heritage wiki. This is a great way to preserve history. I picked the names I'd heard of and looked at country schools in Winnibago in the town of Oshkosh.

After a bit of searching I finally found Bollon in wikipedia. Our population has certainly dropped since 2006. It didn't have a lot of information but distances to other towns and average temperature and rainfall are handy bits of information. This week I have been helping a local child with a local history assignments and according to local records the town was established before the date in the wikipedia. One day I may work up the courage to change this.